Scientific Research

September 23, 2021

Insulin resistance can make you more than twice as likely to develop major depression, even if you haven’t developed full-blown diabetes, a new study reports.

Initially healthy people who later developed prediabetes were 2.6 times more likely to come down with major depression during a nine-year follow-up period, according to the findings.

“The insulin-resistant folks had two to three times the rate of developing depression,” said lead researcher Kathleen Watson, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University.

Previous studies have shown a relationship between insulin resistance and depression, but this is one of the first to show that people who developed insulin resistance were more likely to become depressed later, Watson said.

It’s troubling news for a major segment of Americans at increased risk for diabetes.

Read the full article at U.S. News & World Report »

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A new digital tool is helping health workers manage their mental health. Could it pave the way for a wider transformation in the way services are delivered?

Blog post by Francis Lee, Ph.D.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to exert pressure on global healthcare systems, frontline healthcare workers remain vulnerable to developing significant psychiatric symptoms. These effects have the potential to further cripple the healthcare workforce at a time when a second wave of the coronavirus is considered likely in the fall, and workforce shortages already pose a serious challenge.

Studies show that healthcare workers are also less likely to proactively seek mental health services due to concerns about confidentiality, privacy and barriers to accessing care. Thus, there is an obvious and pressing need for scalable tools to act as an ‘early warning system’ to alert healthcare workers when they are at risk of depression, anxiety or trauma symptoms and then rapidly connect them with the help they need. To address the mental health needs of the 47,000 employees and affiliated physicians in our hospital system, New York-Presbyterian (NYP) has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled digital tool that screens for symptoms, provides instant feedback, and connects participants with crisis counselling and treatment referrals.

Read the full article at the World Economic Forum »

Q. In your work with the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Research Consortium, have you uncovered any new genes that you think might be related to mental illnesses besides major depression?

ANSWER BY: Huda Akil, Ph.D.

Yes, the Pritzker Consortium is interested in three severe psychiatric disorders—major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. We hope to discover the genes involved in these illnesses by studying the genetic variations that are associated with these illnesses and by studying the brains of individuals with these disorders to discover genes and proteins that are altered either because of the original genetics or because of environmental and developmental factors that have converged to change the brain.

Read the full answer at Brain and Behavior Research Foundation »

Carl Zimmer
December 28, 2015

Throughout the day, a clock ticks inside our bodies. It rouses us in the morning and makes us sleepy at night. It raises and lowers our body temperature at the right times, and regulates the production of insulin and other hormones.

The body’s circadian clock even influences our thoughts and feelings. Psychologists have measured some of its effects on the brain by having people take cognitive tests at different times of day.

“Sleep and activity cycles are a very big part of psychiatric illnesses,” said Huda Akil, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan.

Yet neuroscientists have struggled to understand exactly how the circadian clock affects our minds. After all, researchers can’t simply pop open a subject’s skull and monitor his brain cells over the course of each day.

A few years ago, Dr. Akil and her colleagues came up with an idea for the next best thing.

Read the full article at NYTimes.com »

Maria Konnikova
December 26, 2015

“Fibroblast Growth Factor 9 Is a Novel Modulator of Negative Affect,” from PNAS

Depression is notoriously tough to handle pharmaceutically. We still don’t know how S.S.R.I.s work, for instance—or even if they work at all. This paper offers a previously untried target for treatment: FGF9, a neurotrophin (a type of protein) that appears to play a key role in regulating embryonic development and cell differentiation and seems also to be important in regulating our emotional state.

Read the full article at the New Yorker